The Falcon Heavy's Inaugural Flight Set for This Fall

According to Musk himself.

SpaceX

By
Avery Thompson

Elon Musk's Falcon Heavy rocket has been in development for years, but now it's finally ready to fly. In a tweet posted last night, Musk said that the Falcon Heavy will start its first test flight in November.

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The Falcon Heavy is the next generation of rocket for SpaceX. Sporting three booster rockets—instead of the single booster strapped to the Falcon 9—the Falcon Heavy will be capable of launching much larger payloads and sending them much further away. The Falcon Heavy is critical to Musk's Mars plans and could play a role in launching spacecraft to the far reaches of the solar system.

But that extra power comes with many unique design and engineering challenges as well. SpaceX has spent years designing and redesigning the rockets to make sure the Falcon Heavy will actually fly, and previous Falcon Heavy launch dates in 2014 and 2015 were pushed back or cancelled while the company made more modifications.

One of the biggest problems the company has to face is reusability. SpaceX has become very successful at recovering used booster rockets from the Falcon 9, but for the Falcon Heavy the company will have to recover three boosters at the same time. Suffice it to say, this will not be easy.

In fact, there's a very real chance the Falcon Heavy won't make it off the ground at all. At a conference last week, Musk stated that his goal for the inaugural Falcon Heavy launch is to see the rocket not explode on the pad. "I hope it makes it far enough away from the pad that it does not cause pad damage," said Musk. "I would consider even that a win, to be honest."

Still, designing, building, and flying a new type of rocket is not something that can be done in one try, especially for a rocket as complicated as the Falcon Heavy. Even if the rocket doesn't make it into space on the first attempt, it will undoubtedly make it there soon.